How to embed all fonts in a PDF document generated with LaTex

Last updated on June 27, 2020 by Dan Nanni

When you create a PDF file, it is a good idea to embed fonts in the PDF file. If you don't embed fonts, a PDF viewer can replace some fonts with alternative ones if they are not available on the computer. This will cause the document to be rendered differently across different PDF viewers or OS platforms. Missing fonts can also be an issue when you print out the document.

When you generate a PDF document from LaTex (for example with pdflatex or dvipdfm), it's possible that not all fonts are embedded in the PDF document. For example, the following output of pdffonts says that there are missing fonts (e.g., Helvetica) in a PDF document.

To avoid this kind of problems, here is how to embed all fonts at LaTex compile time.

$ latex document.tex
$ dvips -Ppdf -G0 -t letter -o document.ps document.dvi
$ ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress 
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 
-dAutoFilterColorImages=false 
-dAutoFilterGrayImages=false 
-dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode 
-dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode 
-dMonoImageFilter=/FlateEncode 
-dDownsampleColorImages=false 
-dDownsampleGrayImages=false 
document.ps document.pdf

Now you will see that all fonts are properly embedded in the PDF file.

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